How To Produce Layered Claps and Snares for Trance Music

One of the more classic sounds used in Trance and other kinds of popular music is most definitely the layered clap effect. This tutorial shows you step-by-step how to make it yourself.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XitREkTpXQ[/youtube]

[aside title=”Professional Touches!“] Making sure you include little effects like a reverse reverb build-up before a layered clap make your music more interesting to listen to![/aside]
In a music genre like Trance, it is all the little things that can make your tracks stand out above the rest of the competition. Layering a snare drum with a clap, for instance, is something a lot of people do to add a little punch and character to their productions. But taking this one step further and adding a reverse reverb effect as a precursor to that snare/clap hit is some thing changes your music completely.

You start out by laying out a basic drum beat. Now pick a snare hit that you want to use for the layering. This is where you add your clap sample. So now when you play back your audio, you should have one snare hit that really stands out from the rest. It should take on a lot of the clap character. The next step is to add soem heavy reverb. The is no one particular type that works best, but you may want to start off by using a hall preset of some sort and max out the room size and dry/wet parameters. The sound should ring out well beyond what you would normally want from adding reverb.

Once you reverb is set up, it is time to bounce that region to an audio file. Once this is one audio file (rather than midi, or separate tracks) you can easily reverse the snare/clap hit with all that reverb. Now the sample needs to be trimmed and placed so that it makes a small build-up to the original snare/clap hit. The reverse reverb trick has been used for decades now to create amazing tension and build-up effects in music. To make it work for small embellishment like this one, you will need to set up some automation that controls the volume of the sample. It needs to quickly rise up from nothing, right before the snare/clap hit is delivered.

Adding a small amount of sample delay to either the right or left channel of the clap can extend the sound a bit and make the clap sound wider. You can also experiment with adding effects plugins to the reverse reverb sample. Using distortion, chorus, rotary amps, etc can all have interesting effects on your sound, and this kind of playing around with different ideas poften times leads to the perfect fit for the project. Separating out frequencies through filters is also another great way to customize the sound(s) to your needs.

Has this tutorial helped you understand how to create your own percussion hits using reverse reverb techniques? Have a request, suggestion or just want to say? We’d love to hear from you, so go ahead and send us a message now. Thanks for stopping by!